Why Building An Ecommerce Site With Spree Commerce Makes Business Sense

One of the most important decisions when launching an online Ecommerce business is choosing a suitable technology platform. This decision will ultimately influence all other aspects of the company, including the success of the online ecommerce store itself. Some of the important functions that the shopping platform should be able to handle in addition to the look and feel of the site include: management of inventory, delivery tracking, discount management, and overall client buying patterns to name a few. Essentially, the platform helps in managing the operation of your store and thus choosing the right one will ultimately dictate the amount of time, money, and effort that is involved in running a successful online business.

In our experience, most businesses will benefit both in the short and long term using Spree Commerce. I should also mention thsat at LD Studios we have a natural bias toward anything that is built with Ruby on Rails. Our business model is based on building custom software with Ruby on Rails for Small businesses to Enterprise clients. We still work with other technologies but after spending more than ten years building custom software, Ruby on Rails almost always is the best choice for our clients. This platform allows for rapid development, which means it takes less time and money that other traditional platforms such as PHP (Magento), and it can scale up pretty far (~10,000 requests/second). Most apps, unless you're Amazon, don't reach this threshold overnight, so why spend more time and money building a massively scalable platform when your business doesn't need it? Of course, there is a time a place for using other platforms, but unless you are Google and have the resources to create your very own platforms (i.e. AngularJS, Go programming language), you are probably best served using best-in-breed Frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Spree Commerce.

Spree Commerce is a relative new-comer to the E-commerce space. In spite of its young age, it's gaining acceptance with E-commerce businesses of all sizes. It's no wonder its growing: companies of all sizes are attracted to its flexibility and scalability, thanks to in large part by the fact that Spree is built on top of Ruby on Rails and there is a very active open-source community with extensive documentation upon which to draw support and learn. Spree Commerce is a free and open-source technology (as is Magento); however, unlike Magento, Spree is built with Ruby on Rails. The Rails platform itself has a great reputation for rapid web application development - and since Spree is based on Rails it naturally inherits all of the advantages Rails has over more traditional platforms. The commonly used statistic is Spree requires 1/10th the code as Magento does. We have all heard: Time is Money, well, with Spree, your site can be built about 10 times faster, which means it will cost you less in the long run even if your hourly rate is a bit higher (RoR developers are typically about 15-20% higher across the US than php developers, but definitely not 10x per hour more expensive). The last major reason for our bias toward Spree is security. Spree's Rails foundation allows it to stay ahead of modern web security issues. While the Rails core team is busy solving the toughest web security problems, Spree is enjoying those benefits all for free! Furthermore, Spree does not directly process credit card transactions - meaning PCI Compliance is that much easier with Spree. When you hire LD Studios to build your E-commerce website, your Spree app will be more secure from day 1 compared to other off-the-shelf technologies.

Overall, we have worked with multiple platforms and have even partnered with development teams that specialize in Magento. This Magento team actually hired us to build the backend of the store using Ruby on Rails including the login portals and payment system. They did this to regain control of the budget and to ensure the overall solution was released on time for their Big Huge Client™. Re-read that: Even Magento agencies know that Magento (e.g. PHP) development is slower than Ruby/Rails based platforms and reached out to LD Studios to help their project get released faster!

If you are a small business looking to build a custom ecommerce site and you want it done quickly, look no farther than Spree Commerce. Simply stated: Why spend more time and money using some different platforms when better alternatives, like Spree, already exist?